Bio:
Founder and Music Director of musicAeterna Ensemble and Choir
Artistic Director of the International Diaghilev Festival
Chief Conductor of the SWR Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart
Teodor Currentzis is the Chief Conductor of the SWR Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart and Artistic Director of the ensemble musicAeterna and of the musicAeterna Chamber Choir. The ensemble was resident at Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre from 2011 till 2019. In July 2019, Teodor Currentzis stepped down as artistic director of Perm Opera in order to focus on leading musicAeterna to new heights as an independent, privately financed ensemble.
In 2018/19 his first year with SWR, Teodor conducted Mahler 3, 4, Tchaikovsky 5 and Shostakovich 7 in performances in Stuttgart and on tour visiting the Vienna Konzerthaus, Hamburg Elbphilharmonie and Cologne Philharmonie amongst others. He finished his first season with SWR with a final performance of Shostakovich 7 at the Salzburg Festival. In 2019/20 he will take the orchestra on tour to Spain, Italy and France.
With musicAeterna, Teodor regularly tours Europe with performances at the Berlin Philharmonic, Philharmonie de Paris, Baden-Baden Festspielhaus, La Scala Milan and the Madrid Auditorio. They have a long standing relationship with the Salzburg Festspiele; performances in Salzburg include a new production of La Clemenza di Titodirected by Peter Sellars in 2017 which transferred to Dutch Opera where Teodor made his debut in 2018, a full Beethoven symphonies cycle in 2018 in five sell out concerts and Idomeneoin 2019 directed by Peter Sellars in collaboration with the Freiburg Baroque and the musicAeterna choir. Teodor and musicAeterna made their BBC Proms debut in 2018 and made their Japanese debut in February 2019 with concerts in Tokyo and Osaka. This season, they will make their New York debut at The Shed with Verdi’s Requiem alongside moving images from the late Jonas Mekas.
In November 2019, Teodor makes his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic with Verdi’s Requiem and the musicAeterna choir.
Past highlights of Teodor’s career include: Resident Artist at the Vienna Konzerthaus beginning 2016/17 including concerts with Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Camerata Salzburg and musicAeterna; performing Brahms Requiemwith musicAeterna choir and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra as part of the Diaghilev Festival, Perm and on tour in Europe; a tour with Mahler Chamber Orchestra of Berio’s Coro; Clemenza di tito and Mozart’s Requiemat Salzburg Festival, Verdi’s Macbethat Zurich Opera with Barrie Kosky (2016); Wagner’sDas Rheingoldwith musicAeterna orchestra (2015, RUHRtriennale in Bochum); Tchaikovsky Iolanthe and Stravinsky Persephone at Aix Festival (2015) which premiered in Madrid in 2012; Purcell’s The Indian Queen in Madrid (2012); Shostakovich’sLady Macbeth of the Mtsensk Districtin Zurich (2012) and Weinberg’s The Passengerwith the Vienna Symphony Orchestra in Bregenz (2010).
As former Artistic Director of Perm Opera, Teodor has commissioned several important new works, including Phillipe Hersants ‘Tristia’ (2016), Dmitrii Kourliandski’s opera Nosferatu(2014), Alexei Syumak’s opera Cantos(2016), and a violin concerto by Sergey Nevsky (2015).
Teodor Currentzis and musicAeterna are exclusive Sony artists and have released the Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy, Stravinsky’s Les Noces, Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, with Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6and Mahler’s Symphony No. 6. Previous recordings include Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 14, Mozart’s Requiem and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas all on the Alpha label and the Shostakovich Piano Concertos with Alexander Melnikov and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra on the Harmonia Mundi label.
In 2017, ECHO Klassik awarded the DVD/Blu-ray production of Purcell’s Indian Queen, directed by Peter Sellers, with Teodor and musicAeterna, following on from a previous ECHO Klassik award in 2016 for ‘Symphonic Recording (20th/21st century music)’ for their recording of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, both released on Sony Classical. In 2015, Teodor and his brother Vangelino Currentzis, recorded and composed the soundtrack of the European Games opening ceremony in Baku and were nominated for an Emmy Award, in the category of Outstanding Music Direction and Composition. Teodor Currentzis was awarded the Order of Friendship of the Russian Federation in 2008, and was the recipient of the Toepfer Foundation’s prestigious Kairos Award in 2016. The same year, Opernwelt named Teodor Currentzis Best Conductor of the Year for his Macbethat Zurich Opera.
Teodor has so far been awarded seven Golden Masks – Russia’s prestigious theatre award – most recently in 2017 as Best Opera Conductor for La Traviata, a Perm Opera production directed by Robert Wilson. Previous awards include the Best Opera Conductor award (Indian Queen2015 and Cosi Fan Tutte, Perm 2013and Wozzeck, Bolshoi 2011), for a “brilliant performance of Prokofiev’s score” (Cinderella, 2007) and for “outstanding results in the area of authentic performance” (The Marriage of Figaro, 2008).
In 2006, combining his knowledge and passion for early music with contemporary composers and new music, Teodor started the Territoria Modern Art Festival, which in a short space of time has become the most prestigious and progressive annual music festival in Moscow. Since 2012, Teodor has also curated the Diaghilev Festival, held in the home of the composer’s birth town in Russia.
Born in Greece, Russia has become Teodor’s home since the beginning of the 1990s, when he began studying conducting at the state conservatory of St. Petersburg, under the tutelage of Professor Ilya Musin, whose pupils, among others, were renowned conductors Odyseuss Dimitriadis, Valery Gergiev, and Semyon Bychkov.
Contact Information
Management/Booking:
Keynote Artist Management
Worldwide General Management
www.keynoteartistmanagement.com
Libby Abrahams, Director [email protected]
+44 (0) 207 470 8748
Lizzie Morgan, Artist Manager [email protected]
+44 (0) 7736 229467
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).